Neuroscientist REVEALS The Steps To Completely CHANGE YOUR LIFE Today! | Sam Harris | Expert Series

Welcome, everybody, to the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial, and I'm very excited to have my guest, Sam Harris with me today. If you guys don't know who Sam Harris is, I would say, Sam, the best way of me explaining, from what I've seen and read and listened to you, is you're kind of the bridge for me of science and a lot of the Eastern philosophies that exist and for the analytical Western mind, like me, makes it more palatable to go, oh, yeah, this meditation thing does make sense. It does show how this actually is. Does have benefit as well. Do you kind of feel like that's the way it is and that's where you hear from other people as well, that you're kind of the bridge between the Western analytical mind and then also the Eastern philosophies and religions and practices as well?

Yeah, well, those are definitely two domains I've been conscious of trying to bridge. So I'm happy that it's working for you. I guess I'm building a few other bridges as well, but that is probably my main focus at the moment. And as you know, I have a podcast where I talk about all manner of thing, and much of it can be political and unrelated to what we're going to talk about. But I spent a lot of time in another wheelhouse, which is really mostly focused on my app, Waking up at the Moment. And that's where I talk about meditation and related brain science and find points of contact with Western philosophy. But the truth is there hasn't been that many points of contact with Western philosophy of late, because it's been a couple of thousand years since Western philosophy was explicitly trying to answer the question of what it means to live a good life. Right? How do we live a life without regret? So much of philosophy has been totally divorced from that project and devoted to a bunch of interesting, but ultimately not all that consequential linguistic games. And so, yeah, I am not. I don't think of myself as a. As consciously focused on the east per se, but there is an asymmetry here, which is that. And then this is an analogy that may shock some people, but with respect to wisdom, specifically the wisdom born of contemplation, meditation, introspection, there's this asymmetry where in the east, it's a little bit like the asymmetry between Western and Eastern medicine, right? I mean, like real medicine, medicine that makes serious contact with a biological understanding of what we are as organisms. That is Western medicine. It's not to Say that nothing in Eastern medicine has ever worked, but for the most part, if it works, it has to conform to our understanding of biology as it has been born in the West. There really is a similarly extreme and invidious asymmetry between the west and the east with respect to contemplative wisdom. And we might talk about that, but it's. So I just. By its very nature, I have drawn a lot of insight from Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and methodologies.

Yeah. And I know, I know you got your degree in philosophy, and then also you got your PhD in neuroscience, and you've been meditating for 30 years. What? What. I guess the first question is, how did you get into it? What was like the. The beginning of it, the genesis of deciding that, hey, I want to meditate. And then what. What have you noticed over the past 30 years, as far as. I'm really curious, as far as the past 30 years of you meditating? The difference in yourself. But also if you've noticed that, I guess that. That our society is starting to go a little bit more towards mindful. It seems like there's at least a little bit of an awakening to this mindfulness and to actually try to be a little bit more present and try to meditate a little bit more. Have you noticed that as well?

Yeah, well, mindfulness is certainly in vogue, and, you know, for good reasons. It's, you know, there's a superficiality to much of it, so. Which is, you know, worth at least being aware of and if not criticizing. But I think, you know, even a little bit of mindfulness is better than none. And it's increasingly popular now because there is so much competition for our attention and it's so obviously dysfunctional. The human mind was painfully distracted 2,000 years ago. So at the time of the Buddha, the problem, the explicit problem he was addressing, were the consequences of having our minds be, by default, out of control. But there's no question our situation has gotten worse. We've got the most powerful companies on earth right now doing everything possible to pry our attention away from what matters most to us or what should matter most to us. And people, I think, are becoming more alert to the consequences of that, both personally and collectively. Personally, we are living lives that feel more and more fragmented, because, in fact, they are. And societally, we are witnessing just the utterly divisive and deranging consequences of being siloed into these bespoke information bubbles and being gamed differentially by algorithms, whether it's YouTube or just the consequences of Google search or what comes into our timeline on Facebook or Twitter. I mean, it's just we've all been enrolled in a mass psychological experiment to which no one consented and the consequences of which have not really been thought through. And it's pretty clear that many of the consequences are bad. So, yeah, many, many millions of people now are seeing the need to reclaim their attention. And you know, I would argue that our attention really is the true source of our wealth in each moment and therefore each day and over the course of our lives, each even more than time. We all know what it's like to protect our time, but then to squander it because our attention is elsewhere, right? You decide to carve out some quality time with your kids and then you find yourself checking your phone and perhaps having to respond to some pseudo emergency born of your entanglement with it. And so we really have to seize more than time to be making contact with our lives. We need to be able to pay attention in each moment to what actually repays our attention. And meditation is really the art of discovering that and training that.

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Well, the first step is really to notice how distracted you are. And that can come in stages. Most people, when they try to meditate first, I should say there are different styles of meditation, there are different techniques. There are at least two basic principles that differentiate various approaches here and, but both entail non distraction as a basic goal. So the antithesis of meditation, whatever meditation you're attempting is to be lost in thought, is to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. Right. So you want to be able to place attention on something and notice in fact what you intend to notice in those moments. And you can do this narrowly. You can try to focus on a single object. So this is very common in the beginning. Let's say you're being taught a form of mindfulness meditation. You're told to pay attention to the breath and then there's nothing magical about the breath, but it's always appearing. Right. As long as you're alive, you're breathing, and it's fairly salient, you can notice it. And unlike a mantra or some visualization or anything else you might strategically add to your experience, it doesn't require any kind of buy in with respect to concepts. Right. You don't have to, you know, if someone gives you a mantra of a Sanskrit syllable, as happens in techniques like tm, you immediately begin thinking, well, you know, why? What's so important about these syllables? And you know, isn't it a little goofy pretending to be a Hindu here? There's skepticism that creeps in there for many of us.

There's no dogma attached to your breath.

Right, Exactly. I mean, it's just like, just pay. I mean, here's the basic hypothesis. If you want to understand your mind more deeply, if you want to become more sensitive to the mechanics of your happiness and suffering, it makes sense to pay attention. Right? So let's see if you can pay attention. And the truth is, you know, I would invite all of our listeners to try this. If you tried to pay attention to something for the next minute, say, let's say your breath. If you try or, you know, anything in your environment, you could just stare at an object. And you tried to do that to the exclusion of everything else. And in particular, you tried not to get carried away by thought while doing that. Unless you've had. Unless you happen to be some kind of prodigy of concentration or you've trained significantly, the truth is you just won't be able to do that, right? And in the beginning, you'll be so distracted and distractible, you might not even notice how distracted you are. You might come away thinking, oh, I did it. I paid attention to my breath for a full minute. And, you know, so what next? You know, that was easy, right? That the reality is that the more you attempt to do that, the more you'll discover that there's just torrents of white noise in your mind, which is this conversation you're having with yourself. You know, you'll try to pay attention to the breath, and a voice in your head will say, what's that guy talking about? I can pay attention to the breath, right? And that's a thought that you're not noticing. And it's a thought that feels strangely. It feels like self, right? I mean, there's this identity that many of us feel identical. You know, virtually everyone by default feels identical to which is this sense of being a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience. So there's. Most people feel that there's. It's not that there's just experience as a matter of their subjectivity. They feel that they're appropriating their experience. They're having an experience from some point of view as a subject inside their heads. And that is the central illusion that meditation is really designed to inspect and ultimately cut through. And it's something that falls away for us all the time, haphazardly. And those are the moments in life we most value. I mean, the moments of flow or ecstasy or just real connection with the present moment that seemed to come over us. But we can't control that, right? It seems to depend on arranging things in the world so as to be really extraordinary. I mean, if you're a surfer, you have to be actually catching, you know, the great wave to feel suddenly slammed down into experience so fully that then.

The wave always has to be bigger and you have to go for something Every time.

Exactly. And, you know, you're. You know, you have to actually be having sex. And it's just a moment that, you know in sex that you know may or may not come. Right. It's like, like you're, you're, you're just, you're. You're seeking a peak experience for the purpose of getting consciousness to fully coincide with the present moment. And it does occasionally for everybody. And that's why people value specific experiences. And then life becomes really an unending effort to keep arranging experience such that we can have more and more moments like that. And we're constantly trying to get back to our favorite things on the menu. What meditation teaches you is that it's really not about those diverse experiences. There's nothing wrong with having those experiences, and you'll continue to enjoy them. But what really is the principle there is the quality of attention. It's not the fact that you happen to be in the ocean and covered with salt water and. And getting pushed around by a wave that makes surfing so extraordinary for someone who's really into it. It's the. Because really, we're just talking about a collection of sensations, right? We're just talking about, you know, your five senses and proprioception. And it's, it's just not. That is not what is so extraordinary. What's so extraordinary is that it has done something to your mind that you haven't figured out how to do any other way. Right? And meditation is a technique for directly seizing the reins there and learning to that. That paying attention to anything sufficiently yields that kind of reward. And it really can be any arbitrary object, even something as simple as the breath, you know, something as apparently boring as the breath. So in the beginning, you attempt to do that. You attempt to pay attention to the breath. And the first thing you notice is how hard that is. And I mean, as you say, on the point of anxiety, people can tend to encounter a lot of resistance. The mental effort of paying attention can be unpleasant. But the reality is that you can simply just drop back and relax. There is no straining effort that is actually required to do this. What you need to do is just recognize that you're already fully paying attention to something. You can notice simply what you're noticing in each moment. This is where the second type of meditation is. Is more relevant. And this is just more interesting ultimately. And it's the one I recommend, which is, you know, you're not trying to focus on one thing, not the breath or anything else, to the exclusion of everything else. You're Simply trying to notice clearly whatever you're in fact noticing. So sounds and other sensations in the body, and ultimately even thoughts themselves.

Are.

Not distractions from meditation as long as you're clearly noticing what's arising in consciousness. And so in the end, you really want your mind to be like a mirror where everything just is spontaneously reflected whenever it comes before it and there's no effort required. The mirror doesn't have to reach out and seize its objects. Right? It's just, you know, it is just this, this luminous context in which everything is appearing. And your mind can be like that. And it's not. You don't have to make it like that. It's already like that. But you, but meditation is the process whereby you would recognize that and become more familiar with it.

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Where did you do that?

I did it out in Dallas. Right outside of Dallas there's a Vipassana center that's out there.

Was it a 10 day retreat or.

Yep, 10 day retreat. And they follow, you know, the traditional Vipassana. And you can't look anybody in the eyes. You can't. You can't do yoga. I mean, literally all that you can do is you can either meditate or you can go for a walk outside in this little tiny area that they had. And what you notice is how many. What I notice specifically is how I could only get to like two or three breaths before my mind was already somewhere else. And the thing that they tell you is not to judge the fact that your mind is going everywhere. Just bring it back. And that's one of the hardest things that people tend to just, you know, judge themselves. Oh my God, there goes my mind again. No, it's not about that. It's just about bringing your mind back and just going, okay, yep, we did it again. You know, you went off and now we're going to bring it back. And it's funny because after seven days, it started getting, you know, started getting easier. And then eighth day, and I remember eighth or ninth day, I was sitting there and I was about two and a half hours into meditation and I just started to cry because of how amazing I felt. Like, the amount of presence and joy. I was like, if I didn't have to go to the bathroom, I could stay here forever. And it was just. I've never felt so good in my life just by sitting there and meditating. And it's kind of like the thing I love about what you're saying is that whether it's surf or sex or roller coaster or racing that somebody wants to get into that that brings them to the present moment. It's really the amount of that they love is the amount of presence that they are feeling in that moment. And I guess from what we're saying is that meditation is allowing you to get rid of all of the distractions and bring as much presence as you possibly can to a present moment. So that even just sitting there and watching your kids play without feeling like you have to check your phone, the amount of presence and attention you could bring to that moment makes your life more rich.

Yeah, yeah. And ultimately it's not about changing experience. So it's very easy to get the sense that the goal of meditation is to experience extraordinarily pleasant states of mind. Now, as you point out that those. Those states are available. Right. You can certainly go onto a retreat and develop significant concentration. And along with that concentration, just these amazing qualities of mind begin to develop. You can feel bliss and rapture and thoughts can cease to arise and you can lose all sense of your Body. So the mind becomes this really vast open space. And it's very drug like, right? It can, it's, you know, it's very much like taking, you know, certain psychedelics or MDMA or any. You can, you can be in an altered state. And it's very, I mean, it's, it's almost inevitable that someone who has that experience for the first time or even the hundredth time will, Will think, okay, this is the center of the bullseye. I mean, this is, this is why I meditate. This is why I put my, put my life on hold to come on this retreat. This is. Now it's working, right? This is the whole point. And if I could just feel more like this most of the time, you know, I'd be good, right? This is, you know, this, this is the project to get back here and stay here. But the problem is it's another trap. Yeah. Anything, anything, any change in the character of experience of that sort of, is predicated on some causes and conditions coming together which are by their very nature unstable, right? You have to be very concentrated. You can't be, you know, you can't be checking your email. You can't be, as you said, you know, I could see if I could. If I didn't have to go to the bathroom, I could stay here, right? But you do have to go to the bathroom. And the more fundamental insight, which is really the ultimate purpose of this kind of practice is to recognize that consciousness itself, right? That the very consciousness that you would use to check your email or go to the bathroom or do anything else that seems to be not meditating, that consciousness is already wide open, free of self, any kind of impediment. I mean, there's just no, there's no problem. There's no problem to solve when you. In consciousness as consciousness, and that is the thing that is experiencing everything, including states of mind and body like anxiety or anger, right? And so ultimately mindfulness becomes a practice of recognizing the openness and clarity and centerlessness, the selflessness of, of mere awareness, whatever's arising. And you can do that in the middle of, in the midst of your ordinary life and in the midst of even seemingly undesirable and neurotic states of mind. The very states of mind you're trying to get rid of or maybe trying to get rid of by practicing meditation. So something like anxiety. So for instance, let's say you're, you know, say you're afraid of public speaking and you need to go out and give a lecture and you have all this Anticipatory anxiety, that experience, right. That, that can be punctuated by mindfulness in a way that really is freeing. And it can be freeing even in the midst of anxiety, which is to say that, that you can recognize that you're free in some basic sense even before the physiology of anxiety has dissipated. And you can also reframe it as just energy essentially. I mean like you're, when you're mindful of anxiety because there's the physiology of it, the sensations in your body and in your face, right? And at the level of raw sensation, anxiety is very similar to other states of mind that you actually like, right? I mean, like the thrill of doing something that you know, seems to be risky or you know, going on a roller coaster, you know, or go, you know, going white whitewater rafting or whatever it is that you, that gives you a slightly adrenalized thrill, right? Something you would pay to do, right. That is very close to what you're feeling when you are having to give a lecture or presentation and are nervous about it. It's just the frame around it is different. The cognitive summary of the experience is different. But when you get out of this, the story you're telling yourself and you just connect with the raw sensations, they're not that bad. And they're, and in fact they're not even valenced as bad or good. I mean, they're really indistinguishable from again, the guy who's about to go on a roller coaster or get on a jujitsu mat or something. And so breaking that connection is actually stepping out of the thoughts and going to the raw experience can be freeing, really freeing even before the qualities of experience have changed. I mean, they will change. Because the truth is, once you break the spell of identification with thought, it's impossible to stay anxious or angry or in any of these classically negative states of mind for very long at all. I mean, the half life of these emotions is very short, but they do have a half life. So if you're thinking anxiety producing thoughts and then you suddenly become mindful, you can break the connection to psychological suffering instantly, you know, and just become interested and open to the sensations in your body. But the sensations have a half life of their own, you know, 30 seconds, say. And so it's in. The amazing thing is that even coincident with classically unpleasant experience, you can recognize that your mind is just this open context in which everything is appearing and find the freedom in that. And that freedom isn't actually predicated on the next really pleasant thing happening. It's not predicated on oh my God, this feels so good. That's more of a. Again, that's more of your what. When you're doing that you leap back on the treadmill of seeking to change your experience. And again, it's not that you can't change your experience, but all these changes are impermanent and eventually we have to become interested in the context of these changes. And that's what meditation ultimately is.

Yeah, I love that. And yeah, there's actually, I did an episode on this not too long ago about anxiety and excitement. There's an actual clinical term called arousal congruent. The way it's physiology, the actual physiological, physiological feelings inside of your body are exactly the same between anxiety and excitement. And it's called anxious reappraisal. Whenever you're just really anxious, you can actually trick your brain into thinking that it's actually excited. And they've done a lot of studies on this. But really what you're in that going to, it actually is semi against what you're talking about in the first place, which is not even trying to change the emotions. It's just trying to be free from the emotions and not identify yourself as the emotion. Right. Because some people say, oh, I'm an anxious person. And when you now have the identity of an anxious person, the habits, the traits, the qualities, the thoughts that you have are now going to be congruent with that identity that you've now set for yourself. So what you're talking about is seeing the emotion, feeling the emotion and taking a step back and going, yeah, but it's going to end one time and I'm free from this emotion. And it seems like in that moment is actually where you step back and you're able to give yourself some power.

Yeah. Well, I would recommend both, I think both approaches are very useful and practically speaking indispensable for most of us. It's not that you couldn't accomplish all of this with just meditation, but I think it's, I mean to take the specific case of public speaking, right. I think the way to get comfortable in that circumstance is to get comfortable in that circumstance. Right. You can't. Theoretically you could spend 10 years in a cave, meditating, never testing your comfort in public speaking and get over your hang ups and then magically find that when you're thrust in front of an audience you're totally comfortable. That's conceivable. I think the mind, it can certainly work that way. But for most of us the experience would be to continually meet in ourselves this habit pattern of becoming anxious in response to this particular stimulus. And then the opportunity seems to be, okay, I can be mindful of the anxiety. I can be compassionate with myself around the anxiety. I can be non judgmental, I can keep dropping back and relaxing. I can decide that this is just not a bad experience. This is just the experience. And that's okay. But I think it's rational to want something more than that, which is there's no reason for this anxiety, really. Right. And you want to be able to, to find some point of leverage in yourself so that it's just this is no longer a problem fundamentally. Right. And there the, you know, techniques of cognitive reappraisal and reframing are just very useful. And it's. And also just the sort of, this is more like, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, just becoming just the manageable exposure to the stimulus that freaks you out and becoming more and more comfortable in its presence. Right. And it's a kind of, you know, it's almost like a muscle building principle here. I mean, you're just gradually increasing the load on yourself and becoming more and more comfortable with it. And then things begin to shift where, you know, whether or not anxiety, you know, whether or not you're still adrenalized at all, it doesn't have the same meaning. I mean, I used to be someone who was, who was truly afraid of public speaking. I mean, it was something that I took steps to avoid. Right. And then at a certain point, it was unavoidable. I was publishing my first book, I realized I had to do a book tour, and so I just had to get over it. And yes, mindfulness was certainly a part of getting over it, but I just also had to do it. And then if I have to give a speech now, I'm sure if you were tracking my galvanic skin response and my cortisol levels and every other physiological measure of anxiety, you would detect a change in my state. Right. It's not. If I have to go out on stage in front of 3,000 people, it's not exactly the same as me just, you know, walking down to the kitchen and making myself a cup of tea. Right. Something. I'm sure I'm adrenalized to some degree, but the whole thing has been so totally reframed for me that there's no problem with any of that. In fact, that energy is useful. Right. It makes me, you know, less of a sleepy guy that, I mean, I tend to be a low energy guy anyway. You know, I can use a little energy. So it's. And a lot of that is more than just mindfulness. It is more simply having the experience and finding the various gears within it and just getting, you know, frankly succeeding at it, right? Getting positive feedback for doing the thing in the first place that begins to rewire your brain. And so it's, I mean, the basic principle here is that, you know, your brain is a machine that changes based on how it has been used, right? I mean, this is just neuroplasticity has this as a consequence. You know, your, your brain is continually changing as a matter of its physical structure and its moment to moment function and capacity to function in the future. It becomes what you do with it in some basic sense. And there's an analogy here to what we spoke about earlier in terms of our exposure to social media and media in general. Every one of us has noticed that YouTube is training itself to predict what we will want to see, right? I mean, the algorithm is responding to how we use it, right? And, you know, and in some basic sense, you get more of what you click on, right? If you, if you keep clicking on films about, you know, bears attacking, you know, other animals, you just start seeing animal attack videos being sent your way, right? And, and they, they tend to get more extreme. And that is a, there's a deep analogy there with our own minds and brains, right? You begin to conform to what you pay attention to. You begin to conform to what you have found rewarding. And in some basic sense, you can make your mind, you can intelligently guide and curate the contents of consciousness such that you become one way rather than another way. And I mean, I think you said this at the beginning of our conversation, this. In some sense, each of us is a pro at remaining distracted. And I mean, we're, you know, each of us really is the world champion at remaining similar to who we were yesterday, right? And that is not, that's not destiny. That's not. You know, we're not condemned to be that way. I mean, we're, we're making a thousand choices that we're not even aware are choices each day. And something like meditation practice is a choice seems like a real choice that people have to make. I mean, they do feel like they have to sort of get behind themselves and push in order to do it. And it takes some discipline, but eventually it just becomes a quality of your mind. I mean, it becomes something that's not actually what you're doing with your legs crossed on a cushion and then you stop doing when you go check your email? No, it becomes, it becomes a kind of default state of your own awareness where you're just, this is, this is just how you see the world. And meditation in that case is not something you're adding to experience, it's something you're doing less of. It really is just less distraction, right? You just, whenever you're not distracted, that is meditation. Once you know how to meditate, and that's, that's not something you could say of somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. I mean the way is to be focused and to not be meditating. You can be, you know, hyper focused on, on something that you hate, right? And that's, that's not meditation. But once you know how to meditate, it's, it's compatible with any other experience. This can sound a little paradoxical, but because, because people often want to say, well, you know, I don't meditate but I jog or I, you know, I play music or I, you know, I listen to music or I go out in nature. And as though those things were substitutes for learning how to meditate. And the truth is that they're not substitutes. They're not remotely substitutes. I mean, you're no more learning to meditate by doing athletics or you know, walking in nature or playing music or dancing or whatever it is you like to do, then you're, than any of those things substitute for any other. But the reality is that once you know how to meditate, in particular how to be mindful and non distracted, well then you can do that doing any of those other things, you can do that while jogging or surfing or whatever it is. And, and then those things become synonymous with, with meditation. But the bridge can only be walked in, in one direction, right? You just can't, you can't get there from just jogging more. And.

Yeah, yeah, that's, I was really open up to that. When I went, I was over in Thailand and I spent a couple days with some monks over there and they taught us a walking meditation. It's a slow meditation where it's just, but you can't just take it and go, well, I'm just going to walk and that's going to be my meditation every single day. And, and I think it's, it's almost like escapism for a lot of people trying to find something to do to escape from this present moment. I'm curious your opinion or if you happen to have any, any actual data on this as well. But you know, are people running from something that's, that's what I'm always so curious of is, is the present moment so hard because we're running from something like, or is it, like you said, the quality of our mind, we don't want to come in contact with that, or we don't want to think about past traumas, or we don't want to think about, we, you know, have a job that we hate. Do you feel like people are running from something or is it just because we've trained ourselves not to be present?

Well, I think it can be both, but part of it is just this, this unhappy accident of evolution. I think what's happened is that language in particular, you know, conceptual thought in general, but linguistic thought in particular is so useful for us. I mean, just as social primates, we have evolved this capacity and it is the thing that makes us human. I mean, it is, it is the, it is why we are so much more interesting than our ape cousins. And it's, it's, you know, it is how we create culture. It's how we pass down knowledge, you know, you know, brain to brain and across generations, it's the basis of everything we do. And it's, and yet it is, it is a kind of curse psychologically for most of us most of the time. Right? Because once this gets, once this conversation gets started, once it gets internalized, I mean, just look at what happens with a, you know, with a young child. A young child is more or less discovered in his or her crib by others, but before he or she discovers himself there. Right? There can't be a significant sense of self, certainly not a consciously recursive one in a six month old child. Now some rudiments of, of individuation there, but what's, what's happening is you have a, you have a mind which is, is continually confronted by other people for whom it is an object in the world. Right? Like you're being perceived as an object in the world by your parents mainly, and they're talking to you. And you have this, you know, you, you come into this world with the, the operating system that is poised to learn language and poised to learn how to differentiate self from world. And this gets tuned up in dialogue with your parents, but really it takes a while and you begin to participate in this language game and you're always, you know, once you can learn to talk, you're, you're, you're, you're talking to your parents and then you begin to talk to them on, in some sense, when they're not there, right? They leave the room and you're still chattering and you're talking to yourself as though that made any sense, right? I mean, so just look at the structure of our subjectivity here and how peculiar it is. I mean, when, when we're alone with our thoughts, we are very often in conversation, explicit conversation with ourselves, and we'll be narrating our experience to ourselves as though there was some part of us that wasn't also having the experience. You know, who are we telling? Right? Like if, you know, I'm looking for something on my desk and I find it, I might think, oh, there it is, right? Like, but I see it, right? Who am I telling? Like, is there somebody else in the search party, right, who needs to be told that we found this thing, right? There's a, there's an implied duality here that makes absolutely no sense. And to just to get a kind of triangulate on yourself and get a sense of how crazy and non normative your, your default thinking is. Just imagine how crazy you would seem if all of your thoughts were broadcast on a loudspeaker for everyone to hear wherever you walked. You know, you walk into a room and you just helplessly externalized every single judgment and comparison and self judgment and half noticing and it's like, well, why is she doing that? And what's with that hair? Just like, just you compulsively fragment the experience with this just Logaria, right? I mean, you're just vomiting words on everything all the time inside. And the only, the real difference between a normal, healthy mind and the mind of a psychotic is the, you know, we have the good sense to keep our mouths shut, right? If you're doing, if you're talking to yourself, you know, out loud in public, well then people, you know, within three seconds, people understand that you're crazy, right? And all of us have done that too. I mean, some of us, you know, we talk to ourselves when we're, when we're alone, we'll say something out loud. I mean, sometimes, you know, your thoughts escape your lips. But if that happens compulsively, well, then that is kind of the bright dividing line between mental illness and normal unhappiness. But the normal unhappiness is so similar to mental illness, right? It's so similar to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. And so on some level the, the, the real context here for meditation is to, is to form a different expectation about what it means to be healthy and quote, normal and like, what is what Is a, you just have, what can you expect of your mind on a, on a day to day basis? And what would you, what, what is, what are you right to, to expect here? And it does, it just, it does take some training to even see, see a glimmer of daylight here so that you can see that, okay, it's actually possible to be at peace more and more of the time and actually most of the time and, and when you get destabilized by anxiety or anger or you know something, you know, there's some, is there is some real emergency in your life, well then that, that swing into, into obvious mental suffering need not last very long, right. Like most people's before, you know how to meditate and you know, if you get angry, if something, something in the world makes you angry, you will be as angry for as long as you, you'll be angry, right? Like there's nothing, there's nothing but just the dynamics of your own conditioning that will determine or some intervention from the world that will determine how much of an emergency that becomes for you and how fully you destabilize your own life based on the things you might say and do based on being angry. What are you going to say to the people you're angry at and how deranging of your relationships is that going to be? Right. You're just, you're completely, you're just hurled on the winds of your conditioning. And yet once you develop even a little bit of mindfulness, you then have the ability to decide how long you want to stay on that ride for. Right? And you can literally just step off and decide, okay, anger is serving no purpose here. You know, I'm over it. And you can do that very, very quickly because again, the half life of emotion, like anger is very, very short when you're no longer lost in the thoughts that are telling you that you should be angry about this thing. So it becomes a kind of superpower to be able to do that.

Yeah. I always say the path of growth for most people is realizing that something happens and there's a reaction to it. And that reaction can last. You know, someone can do something to me and I can be pissed off at her for a week before I start working on myself and trying to become mindful and start reading and better myself and grow. And as I work on myself for a year or two years that that thing can happen again. And maybe it's five days this time instead of seven days. And then you work myself for a few more days, maybe it's three days. Maybe it's one day, and then you get it down to maybe it's 30 minutes. And then the real path is that, you know, something could happen and you might not even react to it because you might reframe the situation that just happened. And really, that's the path to growth that. That people are working for, is that no matter what circumstances come at me, I will be able to handle them by building up my strong mind. And I want to. I want to take a really weird pivot because I'm really, really curious with this as well. One thing that you're really good at, obviously, is mindfulness meditation, understanding the human mind. But I know that you also have, you know, your thumb on the pulse of what's going on in the world, politics, that type of stuff that's happening. And I'm really curious. There's one thing that you said in one of the interviews I was listening to, and this was actually a few years ago, was that we have to be open to the fact that we might be wrong and in fact, probably are wrong a lot of the time. And I love that because I've actually tried to be like, hey, maybe I'm always wrong. And I feel like lately, I don't know if you felt this way. A lot of people are so stuck into who they are in their beliefs, their political beliefs, whatever happens. And I've noticed, and I'm sure everybody else listening has, that it seems like over the past year, maybe the divide between one side and another side, whatever side those are, has gotten really strong from one side to the other. And I'm curious with you. Do you feel like it's a psychological thing of tribalism, of. You know, I am a Democrat or I'm a Republican or I believe in this, and I believe in this and that people are the psychological. You know, this is who we are, and this is how we've been for millions of years, that the tribalism that's kicking in and it's really hard because of all of the circumstances have gotten harder over the past year. Or do you feel that maybe there is a system that's actually working against. In. Against us in our own psychology and creating the circumstances that making us divide faster?

Well, there's a lot of tribalism, and tribalism is something that we're evolved to participate in. Right. So this is really old legacy code, you know, predates our humanity even. So there's that layer of things, and then it's being leveraged by technology again. Because now your tribalism can be. Can be Amplified. It can be, it can be brought to scale. You know, your tweet can go viral, right? So you can be seemingly leading the tribe in any moment, right?

Right.

And you can also silo yourself so that you're not getting any kind of information corrective from, you know, any other tribe, right? So you can become, you know, informationally xenophobic, you know, and really succeed at that. Right? You can, you can, you can kind of pre stigmatize any inconvenient information in such a way that you, you live in a, in a hermetically sealed worldview. And, and because of the Internet and because of just how much information there is on anything right now, because it's not just you and few crazy people in your village. It's. It's, you know, thousands of people at minimum for anything you want to get embedded in, right? So you can.

Forcing it almost.

Yeah. You can get endless reinforcement for the craziest possible idea if that's, if you want to go down that rabbit hole and, you know, and, you know, literally, you can be a flat Earther and just spend full days seemingly having your. Your, you know, genuinely, genuinely crazy idea confirmed. Right. And what's more, the, the, the provenance of this information can be rendered opaque in a way that, that it never could be in the real world, right? So, like, if, if you were, let's say, going to be totally obsessed with the idea that people are getting abducted by UFOs, right? Like, the abduction phenomenon is something you take a strong interest in, you believe it's really happening, and you read a bunch of books on it, and it just seems like it's really worth your attention. And intergalactic travelers have come here for no purpose other than to probe us anally and kill our cattle. And it's kind of a strange agenda, but clearly it's happening, right? It used to be that if you were going to get really into that, well, then you would have to kind of physically go to one of these conferences and meet the people who are also really into that. And it would just so happen that you. There'd be many other social cues that would begin to reveal other, you know, other aspects of this project that are. That give some clue as to why it's, you know, fairly disreputable. Right? I mean, you're meeting people who are for the most, for the most part, advertising their capacity to believe in lots of crazy things. Right. This doesn't capture everyone who's ever paid attention to that phenomenon, but it's just. There are many tells to the problem of somebody devoting their lives to something that is fringe and requires a lot of conspiratorial thinking that is not governed by the most careful principles of reasoning, right? And there's a kind of a, you know, it's not an accident that, you know, people who believe one outlandish conspiracy theory tend to believe many of them, if not all of them, right? And many of them are working at cross purposes and people are comfortable with the incoherence there. But so having to do that in the brick and mortar world was one thing, but now doing it online, it's stripped away from all of those contextualizing cues, right? You're not meeting the people who don't bathe quite enough. You're seeing a fairly slickly produced video that may have been produced by some 18 year old in his mother's basement, but is really pretty well done, right? And you're not in a position to debunk it, right? And all of a sudden it becomes yet another data point in your worldview that is, that may in fact be just, you know, every bit as persuasive to you as a documentary that took a million dollars to produce and is getting run on Frontline on PBS that night, right? And just basically you think you have in hand the Frontline version of the confirmation of whatever it is. And so there's a leveling of kind of a reputational leveling and a coincident loss of trust in the normal gatekeepers of information. And some of this, you know, loss of trust has been earned, right? I mean, many of these institutions have degraded themselves in how partisan they've become or how just how gamified they've been by the change in business models of online, right. I mean, the clickbaitification of everything has crept into, even the New York Times and, and our best organs of journalism. So that's a problem with the business model and the technology, but it has left us. We just don't have a cognitive immune system for this yet. We have to build one. And it's left us in this very precarious place where our politics and our ability to collaborate with one another generally and just to find common projects that we agree on. You know, how do we respond to a pandemic, Right? What do we do about global warming? Is global warming even a thing? Right. Is that, is it a Chinese hoax? The President just said it's a Chinese hoax. Well, what do I think about that? How can I know? Oh, let's listen to Alex Jones for the next four hours, right? It's completely deranging and we have to find some way to put our house in order. And it's, it's, is a real challenge.

I think what it all comes back to, whether it's meditation, whether it's. All this is, is full self reliance and realizing that you're in control of every thought that you have, whether it wants to be crazy and completely out there and you want to go out and Google it and see if you can reinforce that thought or if you just, you know, see every, see every thought that's coming in and go, all right, well, you know, that's a thought that's coming in. I'm not attached to it. And you know, don't put any emotion behind it as well. The thing that I love about, about what you preach is, you know, it's, it's kind of. You have to go out there and experience it. Right? There's no dogma behind it. It's, it's, it's for you to go out and experience and see what works for you, what doesn't work for you. But ultimately the power is in your hands, which is the most beautiful part about it. But, but I appreciate your time. Oh, go ahead, Rob.

I just add one thing here. So a crucial piece here is to become sensitive to the, the mechanics of all of this. And again, this meditation is the tool you would use to become sensitive. But I mean, for instance, to notice that the way certain facts or arguments or information make you feel is separable from the truth of any proposition, right? So if somebody tells you something is a fact and this causes you anxiety, or, you know, you're disgusted that such a thing could even be true, or you're, you're, you notice that you, you hope it's true, right? Like the, all of these, the emotional valence to any with which your mind greets any proposition that is separable from evidence for or against that proposition.

Mm.

And so when someone is challenging one of your, your cherished beliefs and you feel angry or anxious, or it's just some, some you're in the grip of some psychological rejection state, right. That that should. Most people, Most people's default setting is that. That the very feeling itself is evidence against the proposition. Right. Or for it in the opposite case, when you want to believe something and the first thing to notice is that's just not true. I mean, that is a guaranteed way to be misled in life. Right. That is the emotional code that gives us confirmation bias and wishful thinking and several obvious, you know, reasoning fallacies and Bad heuristics. And so to step out of the mechanics of that is really important. And, you know, the alternate piece of code you could be running here is just to become interested in your reactions to things like that. I mean, to kind of have the metacognitive layer of just being curious about what does it say about me that I'm so reactive to this proposition that I'm spending all my fuel now trying to figure out what's wrong with it and how to knock it down rather than just entertaining the argument for a few more seconds? And so philosophy is very good training for this, because in philosophy, you're often. Especially moral philosophy, you're often entertaining things that just, you know, would bother anyone else. Right. Like, I did a podcast with someone who's a, you know, what was called an antinatalist, right? Somebody who thinks that you're. By bringing children into the world, you're creating great harm because life is really unendurable in the end, and you're basically committing a crime on anyone who you bring into the world. And therefore, it's a good thing not to have kids. It'd be a good thing for all of us to disappear. There are many different flavors of this kind of nihilism. But anyway, there are people who are committed to this idea that life is not worth living. We should admit it, if we all died in our sleep tonight, that would be a net positive. And a few things follow from that that strike many people as starkly unethical or at least undesirable. And so you sort of get into the. The thicket of these thoughts, and you can, you can just have a bad taste in your mouth. You can think, I don't, you know, I don't want to think about this. This is awful. And, you know, who is this person who would. Who would try to spread these ideas? Right. But you can completely flip the script here and just become interested in both the ideas and in the game of trying to figure out where you know what's wrong with them. And, and in the discovery, I mean, the thing you. You should learn to find mental pleasure in is to discover that you are wrong about something of consequence. Right?

Yep.

And that's. That is. That is a kind of a firmware upgrade that most people have not download it at this point. Most people do not want to discover where they're wrong, and they certainly take no pleasure in it. Right. And this is something that I really, I strongly recommend that people find this gear and begin to seek it out, because that is the ultimate Error correcting mechanism to be asking the question, what if you're wrong? Be interested in it, and ultimately to be rewarded by it. Because the thing is, you don't. I mean, what we see so often is this doubling down phenomenon where it becomes obvious that somebody's wrong. It's certainly obvious to most of the people in the audience. And yet you see this person doubling down and tripling down on a bad idea, right? And it's mortifying. Or it should be mortifying, right? This is you. You shouldn't want to be wrong publicly emphatically longer than you need to be right. And so, you know, what you want is the cognitive flexibility. I mean, even if, if your only concern is for how you appear as an ego in the world, the way you want to appear is flexible enough to realize that you were wrong before your opponents do, right? Or the. Or you're so fast to recognize it that when they point it out, they don't even get the satisfaction of landing a blow on you because you're already pivoting. You're already saying, oh, yeah, well, that's a good point, of course. And they get the pleasure of instructing you. And they don't even feel like they've consummated a debate anymore. It just feels like, okay, this is just. He wasn't, you know, I tried to hit him in the face, but his face wasn't. They're long enough, right? And so again, even if egocentricity is your, you know, your, your true operating system, right, you still don't want to be one of these people who is doubling down on an obvious error ever, right? And, and yet so many people just can't. It really is a kind of childlike, you know, automaticity where they just, it's a reflex. It's like, okay, I've got. It's some version of the sunk cost fallacy, right? You've been committed to this thing, so you've invested in it, and now you're going to throw good money after bad until essentially you go broke reputationally. And you see so much of that on social media, and it's so reinforced within the echo chamber of any kind of digital tribe that, I mean, what is so dysfunctional here is that there's so many ecosystems now you can find where nobody's keeping score in any kind of honest way. I mean, in my view, the ultimate example of this is in Trump's bubble, right? I mean, like, nobody who is a fan of Trump is actually keeping track of his errors, right? I mean, they don't care about his errors. Right. And so he has learned not to care about his errors. And it becomes a kind of. I'm sure you've seen these fake martial art videos, right? Where you have the grandmaster of some completely fake martial art.

Someone just falls over.

Yeah, but the truth is you can get deep enough into that world where apparently you, the fake martial artist who's knocking people over with magic believes that he actually has magical powers. Right? Because no one has disco. It's been decades since anyone resisted you. Right. Everyone has been collaborating with your bullshit for years. And I mean, it's gotten to the point of it. I don't know if you've seen these videos, but there's been a couple of cases where these fake martial artists have issued challenges out to the world of other martial artists, people who are not part of their culture, to come in and test my powers. And you know, they, there's this one ghastly video of this, you know, 80 year old master of hocus pocus just getting repeatedly punched in the face by a real martial artist.

Yeah, I've seen that one.

Like that disconfirmation, you know, where you bump into hard objects in reality. That doesn't happen enough in. I mean, there are certain places where it is guaranteed to happen. And that's, but you know, unfortunately those are, those corrections are coming from the, the unspoken world. Right? Like, you know, the world of a pandemic. You know, the coronavirus doesn't care about our politics, it just cares about the actual dynamics of the, the epidemiology. Right. So it'll spread by its purpose, you know, by its, its, you know, principles. And it will affect us to whatever degree it does. And then there's the layer of all of our talking about it and disagreeing about it and fighting about whether or not to wear masks. And you know, and it's if, if we're going to thrive as a species, we have to get the map to fit the territory better and better. And what we're seeing more and more now is that, you know, the, the cartographers have lost their minds and they're, they're shrieking at one another and they're not making any sense. Right. And so that's, and it certainly doesn't help when you see that style of conversation begin to invade science and journalism and as it, as it has.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And it's, it seems like with both of them, it's more of like whether it's the meditation, whether it's realizing that you're wrong and admitting it. It's a mental gym. It's, it's. It's realizing there's growth through all of it. There's growth through sitting through a meditation when you don't want to and seeking that growth. There's growth and going, damn, I was wrong. You know, there's growth in that versus in. And that's where people should get their. Their dopamine release from, is from. Oh, I'm getting growth from this. Of realizing that I was wrong versus my dopamine release is proving to myself that I'm right. And I think if we could all. If we could all kind of take a page from that book, I think a lot of people would, well, world would be a better place if more people meditate and more people admitted they were wrong. That's for sure. So I appreciate your time, man. I know that you're busy and I know you've got an app. You've also got a podcast as well that are perfect for my listeners and people that are out there. So if people want to find you out on the Internet, what's the best places to find you?

Well, for the app, it's just wakingup.com and for the podcast, the podcast is called Making Sense. So you just search under that and you'll get it. But my website is samharris.org which can give you all the other information about me.

Amazing.

Thank you, Rob. It's great to talk to you.

Absolutely, man. I hope you have a great day. Thank you for everything.

You too. Take care.

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